Thread by @EliotHiggins

🧵 I've been digging into this, and it's pretty clear that part of this campaign against Graham Phillips is driven by an article on a fake news website that appears to be run by John Mark Dougan himself.

https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1797015763141734893

I'm not sure where this all started, but the first time the spat appears to have gone public is this post by Graham Phillips about John Mark Dougan, stating "Dougan is accused of having 'gone rogue', and suspected of having taken money from western agencies." t.me/grahamwphillip…

The following day, John Mark Dougan posted this now deleted Telegram post, making various allegations and linking to an article on a site called "ukpoliticking", published on the same day. t.me/BadVolfNews/16…

The article was swiftly deleted from the website, but archived, and contains various allegations against Graham Phillips, which seems to be a mishmash of old allegations and what appear to be made up quotes. I'll note these are unproven allegations.
web.archive.org/web/2024053114…

We'll come back to that site later. Next Graham Phillips reshared a Telegram post attacking John Mark Dougan for running fake news websites, something that's been widely reported in the media. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/f…

Then on June 1st John Mark Dougan responded by posting allegations (which I'll remind everyone are unproven) about Graham, and specifics about the allegations. t.me/BadVolfNews/16…

So, back to the ukpoliticking site, which is made up of multiple articles that are either stolen from other websites, or written using AI, including articles on the profile of "Ivy Thompson", the supposed author of the deleted article about Graham ukpoliticking.com/author/ivy-tho…

But there's an interesting connection between Ivy Thompson's work and another fake news site. First, let's look at this Ivy Thompson article, published a week ago:
ukpoliticking.com/2024/05/26/ukr…

Like many articles written by Ivy Thompson, they have a perfect or near perfect score on GPTZero, and a bit of digging shows a lot of similarities with the content of an article published on Sky News, likely what the AI was asked to rewrite uk.news.yahoo.com/russia-produci…

If you Google the exact text in the opening of each article, you'll only find two sets of results, the occasional original article where they didn't bother to get AI to rewrite them, and results for a site called GB Geopolitics.

Thanks to M2X on the Bellingcat Discord for finding an archived copy of the Great British Geopolitics site that is clearly identical to the site. But why is GB Geopolitics important? ukpoliticking.com

As this thread explains, GB Geopolitics is part of a network of websites with alleged links to John Mark Dougan.

https://x.com/alex___liberty/status/1774067908991168867

So this would suggest that John Mark Dougan published an article on one of his fake news websites that he then used to smear Graham Phillips.

Thanks to everyone on the Bellingcat Discord server that helped unpick this, you can join the discussion here:

and you can join the server with this link discord.com/channels/70975…
discord.gg/bellingcat